


I Have a History of Losing My Shirt

by lincyclopedia



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alcohol, F/M, Humor, Male Friendship, POV Third Person, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, Sharing a Bed, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26039551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lincyclopedia/pseuds/lincyclopedia
Summary: Five times Shitty lost his shirt, and one time Jack found it.
Relationships: Larissa "Lardo" Duan/Shitty Knight, Shitty Knight & Jack Zimmermann
Comments: 9
Kudos: 71





	I Have a History of Losing My Shirt

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, this fic is not meant to be taken seriously. At all. I favored humor over plausibility every chance I got. (A friend of mine with ADHD said things disappear for them like this and it didn’t feel implausible to them. I don’t _think_ I headcanon Shitty as having ADHD, but a good meta could probably convince me, so feel free to link to one or leave one in the comments!) Secondly, I should note that the title is from the Barenaked Ladies song “One Week,” and the full lyric is “I have a tendency to wear my mind up my sleeve. I have a history of losing my shirt,” which I find hilarious.

**1\. Samwell, Massachusetts, fall 2011**

Shitty’s drunk. He doesn’t know what was in that drink—what was it called? “Tub juice”?—but he knows that he’s wasted, possibly as wasted as he’s ever been.

The tree is _calling_ to him. Not literally—he knows it doesn’t have an actual voice; he’s just getting a very strong urge to climb it. He reaches up and grabs the lowest branch. His body feels lighter than usual as he leverages himself up with his arms and swings himself onto the branch. 

He’s made it three branches up when he hears Jack’s voice from below him. “Shitty?” Jack is saying. “Where is your _shirt_?”

Shitty looks down at himself. The world spins a bit from how quickly he moved his head, and he clings to the branch he’s on with as much force as he can currently muster. And huh. He’s shirtless. “I dunno,” he calls down to Jack, slurring a bit. 

“Shitty,” Jack says, and there’s warning in his tone. Shitty likes him, he does, but the dude has zero awareness that he’s a frog. He’ll probably be a good captain someday, at Samwell or in the NHL or one after the other, but right now he’s a frog with a stick up his ass. 

“Let me live,” Shitty mumbles. 

“You’ll have a better shot at living if you come down from that tree,” Jack retorts. “Come on.” 

Shitty reaches up to the next branch defiantly, but then a wave of nausea hits him and he pitches forward, barely managing to stay in the tree as he vomits. Jack, luckily, was already standing a few feet away from the tree, so he doesn’t get splashed. When Shitty’s done, he admits to himself that solid ground sounds pretty good right now, and he begins his descent, feeling around with his feet for the branches below him. He’s glad he has hockey muscles, even if much of his body does feel a little gelatinous right now; he’s pretty sure he’d have fallen by now if it weren’t for how strong he is. 

At long last, he reaches the ground. It’s not until Jack says, “Ew,” that Shitty realizes that he landed in a puddle of his own vomit. 

“Ew,” Shitty agrees, stepping—well, stumbling—forward out of the puddle and scuffing his feet in the grass in an attempt at cleaning his shoes off. 

“Come on,” says Jack for the second time in five minutes, putting an arm around Shitty’s shoulders. “We’re going back to your dorm.” 

Shitty thinks about protesting and decides against it.

**2\. Samwell, Massachusetts, fall 2012**

Jack gets dibs as a sophomore. He also gets the captaincy. Shitty is surprised on neither count. But even though Shitty isn’t surprised, he’s a little disappointed. He’d been working up the courage to ask Jack if he wanted to be Shitty’s roommate when Jack announced he’d gotten Miller’s dibs, and obviously a room to himself in the Haus is something that Jack deserves and could probably benefit from, so Shitty wouldn’t say he’s _bitter_ , exactly, but he’s something. Regretful, maybe.

Since he can’t be Jack’s official roommate, Shitty decides he’ll just take up the position unofficially. He starts visiting Jack at the Haus, especially on nights when they don’t have morning practice the next day, and making himself at home, studying in Jack’s bed or watching Netflix (with earbuds in; he knows better than to mess with Jack’s concentration) or scrolling through Buzzfeed or Politico or whatever. He makes sure to get under the covers while Jack’s still at his desk, the better to make his case against Jack kicking him out. 

It helps Shitty’s case that both of them hate Shitty’s roommate. Shitty had met the guy at a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department event, which had of course been a promising start, but the guy has turned out to be exactly the kind of entitled douchebag that Shitty spends a lot of energy trying not to be—he thinks knowing the right terms for things makes his input more valuable than that of people who are trying to express their lived experience, and once he took a flower out of a bouquet that Shitty had bought for himself and put it in a cup of water on his own desk, while Shitty was watching. He also speaks six languages and once criticized Jack’s French because it wasn’t Parisian enough. So when Shitty says he doesn’t want to go back to Alan, Jack believes him. 

Still, Jack tries to insist that Shitty put his clothes—or at least his boxers and preferably also a shirt and sweats—back on once Jack gets into bed. The first few times, Shitty acquiesces, but the fourth time that Shitty stays over he gets up to put his clothes back on and his shirt is just gone. 

“I can’t find my shirt,” Shitty says. 

Jack rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right.” 

“I’m not kidding. I legit can’t find it.” 

“Well, you were wearing it when you walked in here, and neither of us has left since then, so it has to be here somewhere.” 

Shitty makes an exaggerated show of looking under Jack’s bed and in each corner, shaking his head all the while. He’s privately pretty confused, because Jack is right—there’s no good reason for his shirt to have disappeared. At the end of his circuit of the room, he looks at Jack and shrugs. 

Jack rolls his eyes again and holds up the corner of the comforter. “Fine. Get in here.”

Shitty does.

**3\. Ithaca, New York, winter 2014**

Shitty’s been rooming with Bitty on roadies since the season began, and it’s always gone fine. Sure, they’re both a little chaotic—Shitty more in terms of his energy; Bitty in terms of his propensity to spread his stuff out everywhere despite the fact that they only stay one night in each place—but it works. At first, poor Bitty seemed scared of sharing space with Shitty, and Shitty’s suspicions about that were confirmed when Bitty came out to him, but since the coming-out conversation Bitty’s calmed down around Shitty and rooming together on roadies has been even better. Shitty wishes he could room with Jack, at least some of the time, but he knows Jack usually needs his space and that having Shitty invade his room on ordinary days is plenty, and it’s not like Shitty regrets rooming with Bitty instead. (So much better than rooming with Tolliver on roadies the last two years.)

In any event, Shitty hadn’t really anticipated any problems with the whole roadie rooming situation. If he’d had to envision a problem coming up, it would probably have been Bitty losing something. But Shitty hadn’t expected that, during the first roadie of 2014, he’d get up and find that his bag contained no shirts. He’d slept shirtless, of course—now that Jack let Shitty sleep in his bed without a shirt, Shitty never slept in anything more than boxers; he was basically a furnace and never really needed to conserve body heat. So having no shirts in his bag meant that Shitty literally had no shirts with him. He had a coat, so it wasn’t like he was going to have to walk around bare-chested, but still, what the hell? He wore a shirt yesterday. Where was it?

Shitty knocks on the bathroom door, which is closed. He can hear Beyonce filtering through the door, but it’s not turned up particularly loud. 

“What?” Bitty calls from the other side of the door. 

“Have you seen my shirts? I swear I packed one for today, and I was definitely wearing one yesterday, and my bag contains zero shirts.”

Bitty opens the door, toothbrush in one hand, mouth full of toothpaste foam. “Seriously?” He spits the foam into the sink and asks, “Have you tried emptying out your bag? Or looking under the bed?”

“No,” Shitty admits, but he goes and tries both of those things, and he still has no shirts when Bitty exits the bathroom. 

“Any luck?” Bitty asks. 

“Nope,” says Shitty.

“Weird.”

**4\. Samwell, Massachusetts, spring 2015**

Considering the number of times Shitty has lost his shirt in college, it’s a little surprising that it takes until a few months before he graduates to cross campus shirtless in the context of a walk of shame. Well, not _shame_ , exactly, because Shitty is ashamed of absolutely nothing when it comes to what he and Lardo have just done, but still. This is the first time Shitty has lost his shirt because of sex.

It starts when Lardo texts Shitty to ask for help bedazzling things for her junior art show. They have the art studio to themselves, and they go to town with the bedazzlers for nearly four hours, from midnight until almost four a.m., talking first about nothings like the end of the season and progressing to deeper conversations about graduation and leaving and what, of everything that has happened in college, Shitty wants to remember and keep. High on fatigue and yearning, Shitty looks over at Lardo, waiting until she looks up at him, too, and says, “You. In my life.”

Lardo cocks her head to the side. “Yeah? In what capacity?”

“Fuck, Lards, what’s on the table?” Shitty asks, voice barely more than a breath but still carrying in the silent room. 

Lardo looks contemplatively at the table where several of her art pieces are sitting. “Let’s see. We’ve got a sparkly dildo, a ceramic duck—”

“ _Lardo_ ,” Shitty whines. “Normally I’d be here for it, and I am, in fact, physically here for it, but I meant what I asked. Can I have an answer?”

Lardo looks at him with uncharacteristic openness on her face. “I’m just nervous, brah. What if we fuck this up?”

“What’s ‘this’?”

“Romance? Sex? A relationship thing? That’s what you’re talking about, right?”

“If you want,” replies Shitty. 

“What do you want?”

“That,” says Shitty. “And I don’t think we’ll fuck it up. It’s you and me. We’re solid.” 

“Okay,” says Lardo quietly.

“You sure?” asks Shitty. “Just because I want something doesn’t mean we have to do it.” 

Lardo rolls her eyes. “You know it would be harder to pressure me than that.” 

Shitty smiles a bit at that. “Yeah. It would. So . . .”

“We’ve got a bunch of stuff left to bedazzle,” says Lardo. “But then, yes.” 

By this point, Shitty isn’t surprised when he can’t find his shirt the next morning (or rather, later that same morning), because let’s be honest: he can never find his fucking shirt.

**5\. Providence, Rhode Island, fall 2015**

“Have you lost _weight_?” Jack asks as soon as Shitty finds his car in the parking lot at the train station at the beginning of Harvard Law’s fall break.

Shitty shrugs. “Hard to keep muscle mass on or work up an appetite when I live in a fucking study carrel.”

“Shitty,” says Jack, in that warning way that he’s been saying Shitty’s name longer than he’s been saying it any other way. “You need to eat.” He gets out his phone and adds, “I’m texting Bittle to send us a pie immediately.” 

“You approve of pie now?” Shitty asks. Jack always snuck half a piece when Bitty baked, but that was it. The idea of an entire pie coming to Jack’s condo—Shitty has to admit he’s surprised. 

Jack just shrugs. “I’m going to cook you plenty of meat over the next four days, but that wouldn’t travel well in the mail, and come on. You know I lo—you know we all love Bittle.” 

Shitty looks at Jack curiously, and Jack’s blushing a bit, but he doesn’t say more, so Shitty just starts ranting about Harvard. And it’s easy. It’s _good_. It’s so fucking good. Honestly, Shitty has been worried about this. He’s known, intellectually, that Jack grew up with fame and that becoming the face of an NHL franchise would be unlikely to change him. But at the same time, Shitty’s worried—how could something like that not change someone? How could Jack handle the pressure of being an NHL rookie and fucking _alternate captain_ and still hang onto his college buddies in anything more than the most casual of capacities? 

Shitty knows he shouldn’t have doubted Jack. But since starting at Harvard he’s had to question a lot of things, from his own intelligence to the role his privilege played in his acceptance at Harvard to his motives when he raises issues of oppression in class, and Jack’s unconditional love has somehow wound up on the list of things he’s been questioning. (Luckily, Lardo’s love hasn’t wound up on that list—the two of them are still managing, though Shitty has to admit it’s harder than he would have thought to date while a law student.)

Shitty expects Jack to show him to the guest bedroom—Shitty knows there is one because Jack recorded a condo tour with Falcs TV—but instead Jack tells Shitty to drop his stuff off in _his_ room. 

“You sure, brah?”

“As long as it’s good with you and Lardo,” Jack replies. 

Shitty sleeps very well that night. Neither he nor Jack is surprised when he can’t find any shirts in his bag the next morning. Jack just laughs and lends him a few Falcs shirts.

**+1. Boston, Massachusetts, summer 2018**

Shitty makes _so sure_ that everything is ready for the wedding. He checks in with the caterer, the DJ, the officiant, and what feels like at least a dozen other people to ensure that everything is in order. He memorizes his vows. He makes nice with his father and his utterly awful grandparents in order to avoid any nastiness at the reception.

So how the _absolute fuck_ does he wake up the morning of the ceremony and find the tuxedo hanging in his closet to be missing a shirt? Shitty has other dress shirts, of course, but you can’t wear just any dress shirt with a tuxedo. Does he have time to go buy another tuxedo shirt? Maybe he can call Jack and ask him to buy one. That’s what the best man is for, right? Other than making an embarrassing speech at the reception? 

Shitty calls Jack, who picks up on the first ring. “Hey, Shits. How are you feeling?”

“I can’t find my fucking shirt,” Shitty replies. “So I’m kind of freaking out.” 

“You forgot to go to the dry cleaner, didn’t you?” Jack sighs. 

“Huh?” Shitty asks. 

“The last time you wore your tux was to that pretentious black tie event you got invited to, remember? And you complained about how sweaty you got while you were there, so you decided to get the shirt dry cleaned, but you figured the rest of the tux was fine,” Jack explains. 

It’s coming back to Shitty now. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Can you—?”

“What dry cleaner was it?” Jack asks. 

Shitty tells Jack the name of the place and what intersection it’s at. 

“Perfect,” says Jack. “I’m on my way there.” 

“You’re the absolute best, you know that, right?” says Shitty. 

“I love you, too, Shits,” says Jack, and he hangs up. 

Jack arrives at Shitty and Lardo’s apartment, shirt in hand, with plenty of time to spare, and the ceremony goes off without a hitch. Jack is Shitty’s best man and Bitty is Lardo’s—Shitty and Lardo are going to return the favor next month at Bitty and Jack’s wedding—and vows and rings and everything else all happen smoothly. 

At the reception, Jack clinks his glass until everyone quiets down, and then he starts his speech: “Those of you who knew Shitty and Lardo in college know that Shitty used to have a propensity for nudity. That’s old news. But what I want to tell you tonight is the fact that shirts have a way of just disappearing when Shitty needs them. I first noticed this at our first kegster back in the fall of our frog year . . .”


End file.
